Comment

The App Store is great, but it keeps us very separated from our customers. They can buy an app and leave a review but that's it. There's no way for developers to respond or any other way to contact the customer. Until now...

I honestly never thought I'd ever be writing this but iOS 10.3 which went into beta this week now includes the ability for developers to respond to reviews and for both customers and developers to edit their reviews/responses!

There's more too! The new version also includes SDK additions which allow reviews to be requested, written and posted inside your app, without bouncing the user out to the App Store. The whole process looks very smooth.

So, we're all happy right? Well, of course not. 🙄 This is a vast improvement but there are some caveats. For example, apps can only prompt customers for a review three times in a year. It doesn't matter how much you spam the API, once the prompt has been shown 3 times, you're done and new app versions don't reset the count either. Also, Apple are going to be transitioning these APIs to be the only acceptable way to request reviews and I expect other methods to be covered by new review guidelines as 10.3 gains adoption.

I am actually happy with both those restrictions though. The "standard" method of requesting reviews right now is so full of tricks that it makes the whole thing just feel grubby. In my opinion, anything we can do to cut down on review prompt spam and standardise it into something users can trust is a good move. I'd even predict that once users do get back trust, response rates are even likely to rise. (Look at me making unprovable predictions! 😀)

I do have one thing I'd like to see in addition to these changes though. I hope that they do away with reviews being "wiped" when a new version of an app is released. I understand why this is being done today, but it also contributed to causing the review prompt spam problem that we ended up with. Instead, I'd like to see reviews stick around forever, but for their relevance decay over time in some way so that it's possible for ratings to reflect the current state of the app. There's no announcement about anything like that at the moment though.

Still, we're going to be able to respond to customer reviews and that's a great change that I had given up on. Amazing.

Dave Verwer

News

More 10.3 changes! This is a slightly strange feature, but the new beta allows apps to include two icons and change between them with a call to this API. To be clear, this is not a way to have a dynamically drawn app icon and it will require explicit user confirmation when the change is requested. Steve Troughton-Smith has put together a quick demo app if you'd like to see it in action.

The first beta of Swift 3.1 also made an appearance this week and with it, this post on the official Swift blog on how large mixed Swift/Obj-C projects are going to see significantly improved compile times. Xcode 8.3 includes the new compiler if you have a project you'd like to give it a try with.

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Code

Looks like plans for Swift 4 are firming up and various manifesto documents (for example, Strings last week) are making their way into the Swift repository. This one is a very thorough discussion of ABI stability.

Ole Begemann talks customisation of string interpolation in Swift. He defines two new string types to hold sanitised and unsanitised HTML strings that behave differently when interpolated. There's some code in here which is already deprecated awaiting a redesign in 4, but it's still a really interesting post.

Videos

Ben Scheirman and Soroush Khanlou run through the implementation of the Poker Hands kata. I like watching two people solve a kata as you get to see/hear their internal thought processes clearly as they need to discuss the potential path forward with every step.